


little victories

by orphan_account



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Drama & Romance, F/M, Gender Issues & Identity, Some Humor, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6235063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Midsummer, 1862: An unusual soldier arrives at Mansion House, and Mary Phinney struggles to preserve her equanimity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	little victories

**Author's Note:**

> "Tell me not in mournful numbers,
> 
> Life is but an empty dream!
> 
> For the soul is dead that slumbers,
> 
> And things are not what they seem."
> 
> \--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, excerpted from "A Psalm of Life" **

_We must make do with our little victories_ , Emma thought, clutching her armful of bandages a little tighter. She imagined she had steel rods keeping her spine straight as she strode resolutely into what had once, not so long ago, been the main dining room of her father’s beautiful hotel. It was full of Yankees now, most of them riddled with disease and bullets from the guns of men she’d known all her life. 

She came very close to turning around and running out, back to the bedsides of her heroic rebels, and damn the smirk on that self-righteous, impertinent, _blue bellied_ chaplain’s damnably handsome face. She had not known she could feel such frustration and hopelessness as she had been feeling lately. She hadn’t heard from Frank since she’d missed their meeting, thanks again to that fool chaplain, and now her little sister had taken to disappearing at odd hours, going around looking so solemn it made her mother cry. 

Emma thought of her mother’s Apples a la Parisienne, and walked on steadily. She could do this. She was full of as much human mercy as any Yankee chaplain, and if he ministered to both sides, then by heaven she would not shame her mother or father or Dixie itself by doing any less. 

She refused, however, to lower herself to the indignity of actually being _friendly_ to the invaders. 

The main rooms of the hospital were noisy and busy as always. She’d gotten accustomed, more or less, to the cacophony of groans and agonized cries that followed her round the wards most days, but she had trouble with the colors, still. She dreamed in those colors sometimes, garish reds and purples and greens and blacks; you never imagined skin and sinew and blood and bone could come in so many horrible hues. They always tugged at the corners of her eyes.

As she picked her way down the long hall, dodging orderlies and stepping over chamber pots, her attention was captured by a boy towards the back wall. He was awkwardly shifting one heavily bandaged leg off his bed and attempting to get to his feet, a grimace twisting his face.

Emma rushed towards him. She’d seen this kind of thing before, men arriving from the front unconscious and waking up in a panic, their minds still lost somewhere on the battlefield. She reached him just as he managed to plant both feet on the ground and shoved him firmly back down with her hands on his shoulders. 

“You’re alright, soldier,” she said brusquely. “You’re in a hospital in Alexandria and we’d much prefer you stay right here until that leg is healed up.” 

The boy looked up at her with wild blue eyes, and Lord, he couldn’t be more than sixteen. He was pale, slim, and beardless, his features oddly delicate, though they were distorted by pain and fear. 

_So the Federals were sending children into battle now, were they?_ Emma frowned. 

“How old are you?” 

“Twenty, ma’m,” he said, struggling weakly against her hold. His voice was pitched lower than she’d expected, so she didn’t fight him on the number. “You don’t understand, I have to go, I can walk –” 

“Hush.” Emma snapped. “You can’t either and you’re staying here. Have you seen a doctor yet?” 

“No, but – ” 

“Alright, well, let’s get that uniform off and you cleaned up, or that wound will get infected sooner than you can say – ” 

“ _No_!” The boy surged forward, fighting her harder, his voice cracking slightly. “No, please, Nurse –!” 

“What is the _matter_ – ” her eyes caught his for a heartbeat and they both froze. She took in again his youthful aspect, his slight stature, his clear desperation. There had been a moment, meeting his eyes, when she'd unexpectedly been reminded strongly of Alice again.

 _Alice_.

“Soldier,” Emma said slowly. “Take off your cap. Now.” 

He obeyed, and blond curls tumbled free, inexpertly shorn. Bad haircuts weren’t exactly uncommon among soldiers, but the sight of those curls made everything suddenly clear to her. 

She let go of his shoulders and stepped back abruptly. The soldier, wearing a beseeching expression, didn’t move. 

_A woman_. 

Every nerve in Emma’s body cried out to reveal her. This woman could hold the gun that would kill Frank, a gun that might have already killed so many Virginia boys. 

“Please,” the young woman whispered. Emma looked hard at her, and her terrified blue eyes. 

It was only… she really did look so much like Alice. And wouldn’t it be just like her wild little sister, to do some fool thing like this, dress up like a man and run off to kill Yankees? Silently cursing herself, Emma chanced a quick look around the ward. No one was paying them much mind, for now. She turned back to the soldier.

“If you run,” Emma hissed, “so help me I will climb up on the roof of this hospital and send the whole of Alexandria out after you. Wait. _Here_.” 

The woman nodded. Emma spun on her heel and marched away with her heart pounding. She needed to find Nurse Mary.

* * *

“Have you so few patients, Nurse, that you have time to waste fretting over me?” 

Mary stopped walking and sighed. Dr. Jedediah Foster was just visible in the crack of the supply closet door, facing away from her and scanning the shelves for something. He did not turn, but there was teasing in his tone. 

“I wasn’t going to stop. And how on earth did you know it was me?” 

Dr. Foster – he had given her leave to call him Jed, but sometimes she felt ‘Doctor’ suited him better, arrogant as he could be – poked his head around the door and grinned.

“I know your step,” he replied, “and there was hesitation in that step.” 

He held out an arm to show her the bottle in his hand. It glinted in a beam of morning sunlight, and it was quite clearly not morphine.

“I was looking for quinine.” 

“I can see that,” Mary said, feeling her cheeks warm. Fine, so perhaps she _had_ paused, just for the tiniest moment, when she caught a glimpse of his profile near the supply closet. Really, it was her responsibility towards the hospital. They could not afford to lose a skilled doctor. 

“I merely – ” Jed held up his free hand to stop her and she bit her lip, annoyed. 

“It’s fine, Mary,” he said. “Your lack of trust wounds me, but I’ve weathered worse.” 

He closed the door behind him and rolled the bottle of quinine in his fingers, still smiling. He was standing too close. He always stood too close. But, as she seemed to be constantly reminding herself, he behaved this way with everyone. She had thought, for a while, that some of his stranger habits and quirks would turn out to be side effects of morphine dependence, but it seemed he was just like this. He still spoke too freely and too impatiently, contradictory in almost all things. His dedication to his patients was absolute, but his bedside manner veered between tender and contemptuous at a pace she couldn’t track. Sometimes he looked at her as if she were a diagram in one of his textbooks, as if trying to decipher her. She had not thought herself so difficult to puzzle out. But, she supposed, his real interest was in puzzling out humanity at large. 

And he always stood too close. 

“It isn’t a lack of trust,” she said quietly. “It’s concern. There is a difference.” 

“May I ask, a concern for me? Or for the hospital? Or indeed, for yourself?” Teasing, _still_. Mary pursed her lips. 

“Believe it or not, _Doctor_ , I am capable of concerning myself with all three of those things at once.”

Jed hummed, enigmatically, and nodded.

“Of course,” he said. “I should expect no less.” 

Time stretched out before Mary as they regarded each other. In a hospital, every minute counted, and she should not be wasting hers here, basking in what little sun reached inside Mansion House, noting how it illuminated the fraying on the cuffs of Jed's sleeves and on her own. Keeping the good doctor from his duties. But the day outside did look so terribly inviting, hot and yellow-bright. If she were back home in Boston, she’d have taken a picnic lunch and a poetry book to the Common and lazed until sunset.

Oh, but this summer was a hard thing. It wasn’t just the oppressive heat bearing down on the wards. This was dreaming weather, and every doctor, nurse, and patient alike was looking outside and longing to be somewhere else, even more than usual. 

Jed followed her gaze to the windows. 

“Honeysuckle season,” he said, half to himself. “There are woods near my father’s house, chock-full of the vines. They’d be in bloom this time of year.” He breathed in deeply through his nose, like he could smell the flowers from here. “My mother used to get so angry with Ezra and me… we’d eat the stems, and then track the petals indoors.” 

“What terrors you must have been,” Mary said, absently. She closed her eyes and tilted her head at a better angle towards the light, her mind still reclining on a grassy plain, listening to the bustle of a far-off city. 

“Pardon me, Nurse Mary?” Miss Emma Green’s voice snapped her quickly back to reality. She blinked, and Jed was suddenly deeply fascinated by something on the wall just over her shoulder. Miss Green stood at her other side, wringing the edge of her apron in her fingers. She looked distressed, and she cast a small, wary glance at Jed.

He noticed, and cut his eyes at Mary knowingly. 

“Excuse me, ladies,” he said, backing away with an incline of his head, “I have a patient to attend to.” 

They watched him go; and then, Mary felt Miss Green’s hand brush hers. 

“Nurse Mary,” she said, quiet and curiously urgent. “I need you to come with me to see a patient, please.” 

Mary was restless, and hot beneath her skin; she was in no mood to fight the good fight with Miss Green today. 

“A Confederate boy?” she asked, sharper than she intended. Miss Green flinched. 

“No, one of your – soldiers,” she said.

"I’m not sure I have time just now, could you perhaps find Miss Hastings? Or- ” 

“I would prefer it be _you_ ,” Miss Green interrupted. Her pretty eyes grew even wider, which Mary hadn’t thought was quite possible. “The situation is – delicate, and you are the only one I trust.” 

At that, Mary felt a strange stab of affection for the little rebel. Trust? There were few enough Union nurses who seemed to feel that way about her. 

“You trust me?” Miss Green hesitated for the barest moment, and Mary’s hopes were dashed. 

“In this,” Miss Green specified, firmly. “In this, yes, I trust you.” She took gentle hold of Mary’s wrist again. 

“Please try not to look too shocked,” she said, and leaned up on tiptoe to whisper something in Mary’s ear. 

Mary was immediately grateful of the position this put them in, as she was spared the embarrassment of Miss Green witnessing the expression that crossed her face. It was, without a doubt, _decidedly_ too shocked.

**Author's Note:**

> **Sorry for being pretentious with the poetry, but Longfellow and Whitman are two of my favorite poets of all time and they wrote around the time of the Civil War, thus I have a great excuse to reference them here.
> 
> My inspiration for this plotline, btw, came from Karen Abbott's book "Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War", specifically the story of Sarah Emma Edmonds, one of several women who served in disguise as men on both sides of the American Civil War (Edmonds herself fought for the Union under the name Franklin Flint Thompson).
> 
> I'll talk more about her in later chapters, but I did want to say straight off that, as a straight cis woman, I know very, very little about the complexities of gender identity and performance. I would like to be as sensitive as possible in broaching these topics, and I welcome any advice or criticism anyone can offer. It should be noted, however, that in the 1860s the conceptual framework we now have for understanding nonbinary or transgender identities simply did not exist. Therefore, I'm going to follow those historical conventions, and use female pronouns for everyone who is biologically female.
> 
> PS: It's worth nothing that dressing as a man in the 19th cent was for some women a very practical solution that had nothing to do with gender or sexual identity. And in the case of soldiers, some women simply wanted to fight, and the only way they could do that was as men.


End file.
